The Trouble with a “Jock Culture” at the Office

A few years back, I took over a large research business that was dangerously close to free-falling. Sales had shrunk for 13 consecutive quarters. Many of the best people had left for greener pastures; the worst people had been laid off. One of the board members joked that the only employees left were politically-adept mediocre players. That wasn’t completely true, but it wasn’t totally false, either.

The team I encountered when I arrived was made of a single, distinctive type. They were 100% male, and 100% former jocks–mostly basketball players. Sports permeated the culture. Monday morning staff meetings were spent recounting the weekend’s pro sports games, or their own amateur athletic endeavors. The sports focus created enormous insularity—it was difficult for anyone who didn’t follow the Bruins or the Pats to gain traction in a conversation.

Meanwhile, their business performance was abysmal. These guys would make a forecast on Monday and miss it Friday of that same week.

I wound up replacing that team with a mixture of men and woman with many different backgrounds, effectively breaking up the company’s sports cabal. Soon the jock network was gone. It was not intentional—I never consciously thought, “I need to get rid of the jocks.” I just put in place the folks I though were best, jock or not.

The experience has stayed with me, however. Many companies have strong jock cultures, particularly in their sales departments. Many managers prefer to hire former athletes, figuring that someone who’s put in years of (sometimes painful) hard work to become a high-performer in a competitive sport will show the persistence needed to succeed in non-athletic pursuits, too. In business-to-business selling, entertaining clients at pro sporting events (or on the golf course) is commonplace, so it’s natural that sports fans gravitate to these jobs. (Some of those jobs all but require people to become conversant in sports, even if they’re not really interested.) And in any company, it’s natural for cliques to develop, and for people with similar interests to band together—whether the groups consist of people who do yoga at lunchtime, gossip about reality TV shows, or knit.

Still, I’ve come to believe that having an intense jock culture creates an unusual set of problems. First, the teams are not just dominated by men—they’re almost exclusively men. And anyone who has successfully built teams over the years knows firsthand how crucial woman are to better team performance. Second, the sports metaphors run out of explanatory steam very fast. How many times can you say “We need to keep pushing the ball up-court”? Third, diverse of points of view are lacking. Groupthink sets in, and teams tend to keep pursuing the same strategy, whether it’s working or not. Fourth, this all adds up to an exclusionary vibe. Different types of people are not welcome. If you’re really smart, but a bit different, it doesn’t matter. You’re not accepted, nor do want to join in the first place. This puts the organization on a death path.

In my experience turning around the formerly jock-oriented company, the more I traveled around this business, the more I learned how much its formerly cliquish insularity had been hurting its overall performance. I met many men and women (especially women) who’d concluded they’d never get promoted, recognized for awards, or included in the company’s elite trip to Hawaii (for high sellers) because they didn’t fit in with the jock group. They did what they had to do to keep their jobs—but no more, because they felt demoralized and excluded.

Once the jocks’ control of the culture abated, these workers began to shine. They’d been working at about 70% of their capacity, they told us. Once they were convinced the culture was changing and realized they could be promoted and rewarded, they worked harder. Productivity soared. When a few thousand people increase their productivity by 30%, it has a meaningful impact.

My new leadership team hadn’t anticipated this effect. While we hadn’t liked the culture we encountered when we arrived, we’d seen so many jock-centered cultures during our time in business that we’d become used to them. We hadn’t focused on the culture as the problem—we’d focused on the poor performance. It wasn’t until after we broke that culture that we saw how pernicious it had been—and saw a measurable payoff from working to break it.

To be clear, I love sports. I played in high school and college. (I was mediocre.) I still enjoy going to games of all kinds. I follow the standings, especially in baseball. In fact, a few years ago I took many dozens engineers from foreign countries to Yankee Stadium. They had been fascinated by the strategic aspects of baseball and wanted to see a bit of American culture, and our outing was a wonderful experience.

But being a sports fan is just one aspect of my personality and life. It doesn’t dominate what I think about—not even close. At our Monday morning meetings, sports does come up occasionally. But my team is just as likely to talk about taking our kids to the zoo, a book we finished reading, or a good vacation.